Abstract

In that study we present and analyse statistical data of some Least Developed Countries (LCDs) telecommunications and ICTs sectors in terms of universal access, use and advances, technological challenges and accessibility. We also focused on the opportunity, importance and roles of the Free Space Optical communications (FSO) for developing and expanding rapidly the infrastructure of telecommunications in LDCs and present a case study, in Dakar, an area, in Sahel. Sahel region, like many least developed countries, is characterized mostly by long last mile up to 2 km and an evolution of the network architectures and capabilities covering network core with 2, 5 to 10 Gb/s, metro core covering 2, 5 to 5 Gb/s, metro Edge with rate around 155 Mb/s to 622 and a low and poor access network dominated by wired copper. In our study, we confirm that a minimum range of 2 km is possible at any time for the FSO we used for the simulation with availability up to 99.999%. We also underlined the advantages of FSO, in terms of cost, ease deployment compared to fixed optical fiber and its concurrence in reducing the price of the basics telecommunication services.

Keywords:

Fixed telephone, FSO system, ICT cost, internet, mobile telephone, universal access, optical link,

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Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

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